St. Isidore Parish in Yuba City will be celebrating its 50-year jubilee in multiple events over the coming weeks.

In 1952, Sacramento diocesan officials proclaimed St. Isidore as new parish split from St. Joseph Parish in Marysville.

At a special 10 a.m. Mass on Sunday, April 27, at St. Isidore, Father Soane Kaniseli, pastor of St. Joseph Parish across the Feather River, will commemorate the historic event by reading again the original proclamatory letter.

Among the people there to receive a copy of the treasured letter will be Margaret Steel, who was among the lay pioneers of St. Isidore Parish, according to Karen Brown, current business manager.

“They used to hold Mass at (Steel’s) home before we had a church,” Brown recalled.

A half century of history will be further celebrated on Saturday May 10, with Bishop William K. Weigand presiding over a gala bilingual Mass at 5 p.m. followed by the dedication of the new $2.6 million parish center, Brown said.

While it may have begun as a small offshoot of the older St. Joseph Parish in Marysville, St. Isidore has grown greatly, especially in recent years as Yuba City and Sutter County have outpaced its neighboring twin city and county.

St. Isidore now has more than 1,560 registered Catholic families in the parish. St. Isidore School has 183 students in kindergarten to eighth grade, Brown reported.

Father Loreto Rojas, parochial vicar, known affectionately to parishioners as “Father Bong,” said that the Yuba City parish is one of great faith and diversity.

“I’m called ‘Bong’ in the Filipino tradition of calling the eldest ‘bong,’ or ‘junior’,” the 28-year-old priest explained.

The congregation he serves is 40 to 45 percent Hispanic, three percent Asian and one percent African American, with the remainder Caucasian, Father Rojas said. But it is nonetheless a united and blending parish, he added.

Both Father Rojas and Father Manuel Soria, pastor, are bilingual (Spanish-English), which helps bridge the two most populous segments of the parish.

“We have a lot of bilingual events which bring everyone together,” Father Rojas noted.

After three years serving St. Isidore, Father Rojas said he will be departing in June to return for studies in Rome, and he will miss the parish he has come to love.

The first church for the parish was a modest chapel built for Italian prisoners being held at what is now Beale Air Force Base in Yuba County during World War II.

In 1952 it was transported lock, stock and vestibule from Beale to the parishes initial digs on Cooper Avenue in Yuba City. It was later moved again to the Clark Avenue location the parish now calls home.

In later years the picturesque chapel gave way to the much larger church were the faithful now worship. But it remained in use as both the parish hall and, with its restaurant-type kitchen, the venue for hot lunch for St. Isidore School students.

“I can remember coming to church here,” said Margaret Stawpert, who grew up worshipping in the small chapel. She is now the co-director of kitchen services and school lunches.

Stawpert’s small dining hall will soon give way to the spiffy new 16,000-square-foot parish center expected to be completed in the next two weeks or so, according to construction supervisor Paul LaPlante.

“The landscapers were supposed to start today,” LaPlante said in a recent interview, looking around at the neat, but still turfless campus setting.

The dream of a new parish center began about three years ago when the parish launched a successful $2.6 million capital acquisition program that, according to Brown, drew on the spirit, ingenuity and generosity of many faithful in the diverse parish.

Work began on the parish center in October and, with, six months later, craftsman putting the finishing touches to the inside accouterments.

The new center includes an office, a conference room, two bathrooms, a 7,000-square-foot multipurpose room and a state of the art commercial kitchen and storeroom.

Kitchen workers can serve direct to the multipurpose room or to a dividable dining room than can be split into both large and small rooms to accommodate events of various sizes, said LaPlante, of Hilbers Construction Company.

For many, the jewel of the facility is the multipurpose room, with its polished hardwood floor and large seating capacity for basketball and volleyball games and musical events.

“We’ll finally have indoor basketball,” Stawpert said.

The arts have also been considered in the design and construction of the center. “There’ll be a portable stage for plays,” LaPlante said.

“And you see those speakers up there,” he added, pointing to large rectangular speakers hanging suspended from the rafters some 70 or 80 feet in the air. “When those things are on, you can really feel the music.”

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